Love is a bridge that connects us to our soul, to one another, and to God.
Deuteronomy 7:7-8—It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
PART ONE: LOVE CONNECTS US TO OUR SOUL
When the apostle John declares "God is love" in 1 John 4:7, he crystallizes the Hebrew Bible's central witness. The Shema commands Israel to love God with all their heart, soul, and strength—but this flows from God's prior love: "
Exodus 34:6—The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,"
Chesed (חֶסֶד), God's steadfast love, appears over 240 times in Scripture. In Psalms 136.1 scripture tells us to "Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever."
The prophets reinforce this: Hosea shows God's unwavering love despite Israel's unfaithfulness; Jeremiah 31:3 declares "I have loved you with an everlasting love"; Isaiah 54:10 promises God's kindness will never depart.
We are created in the image of a loving God—designed for loving relationship. To love truly is to fulfill God's will.
Why Love Is So Difficult
Love requires vulnerability, sacrifice, and death of the self-protective ego.
Genesis 3 shows the fracture: after the fall, shame replaces trust, and self-protection becomes our default. Jewish tradition speaks of the "yetzer hara" (יֵצֶר הַרַע) which means the "evil inclination" or "bad impulse" in Judaism. It is a powerful inner drive that pulls us toward self-centeredness, scrambling for significance and terrified of inadequacy.
The Hardest One to Love is Yourself
You know every failure, every compromise, every gap between who you want to be and who you are. Unlike external enemies you can avoid, you're stuck with yourself. No escape from the mirror.
"You should have known better." "You'll never change." These aren't the enemy's accusations—they're our own, and they're relentless. We see the chasm between God's holiness and our brokenness. Self-contempt masquerades as humility. But hating yourself isn't honoring God—it's calling His creation garbage.
C.S. Lewis observed we can forgive enemies occasionally, but the person we live with constantly is much harder. You live with yourself every moment, knowing your repetitive sins, your broken-record failures.
Lewis's observation cuts right to the bone. Lewis was ruthlessly honest about the domestic nature of sin - how it's not the dramatic falls that wear us down but the same petty resentments, the same familiar failures, morning after morning.
Leviticus 19:18, "Love your neighbor as yourself", isn't an isolated command, rather it is the heart of the Torah's vision.
You can't give what you don't have. If we despise ourself, we can't love others. To love ourself we have to accept ourself. We need foregiveness. This is where repentance comes in. But for repentance to be effective we have to believe God will foregive us.
The longest journey is from head to heart—from knowing God loves you to believing you're worth loving.
Narcissistic "love" is a defensive fortification. The narcissist doesn't love who they actually are. They love an image they've constructed, and they're in a constant state of panic that reality will puncture it.
When We Love Ourselves, We Connect to Our Soul
When love and accept ourself we connect with who God created us to be. Not the performance version. Not the defensive version. Your true self—the image beneath all the layers of protection.
When you see yourself as God sees you—beloved not because you've earned it but because Love itself chose you—something shifts. You stop living from outside in (driven by others' approval, fear of failure) and start living from inside out.
This is the bridge love builds: from the fragmented self to the integrated self. From self-hatred to self-acceptance. From performing to being. From exile to home.
Love connects us to your soul—to who we truly are and God always meant us to be.
A little chuckle on the subject:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1C7yF6YTwk/
PART TWO: LOVE CONNECTS US TO ONE ANOTHER
When we stop calculating, stop protecting, stop demanding reciprocity—we participate in the divine life itself. To truly love is to ascend into God's own nature.
Yeshua reinterprets Jacob's ladder (Genesis 28) that connected earth and heaven: the Son of Man is himself the ladder (John 1:51). Love incarnate is the connection point. When we love, we ascend.
Eastern Christianity speaks of "theosis"—becoming by grace what God is by nature. Second Peter 1:4 says we "become partakers of the divine nature." Love is the mechanism of divinization.
We don't ascend by withdrawing from human love. We ascend through loving the neighbor, stranger, enemy. Matthew 25: when you fed the hungry, clothed the naked, "you did it to me." The mystical and practical are one. You climb by loving the person right in front of you.
When Moses encountered God, his face shone (Exodus 34:29). When Stephen was stoned, his face was like an angel's (Acts 6:15)—while forgiving his murderers. His ascent occurred in his descent into suffering love.
We are trapped in our ego. When we love others, and extend forgiveness our soul is able to break free and ascend. Acts of true love give us a glimpse to the future final glorification of God’s Kingdom to come.
Love is our ladder, our wings, our participation in divine life. When we truly love, we become who we were always meant to be.
Love Is A Bridge Between Jew and Christian
Jews and Christians share the same foundational revelation: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob whose essence is love—chesed, rahamim (רַחֲמִים), ahavah (אַהֲבָה); Deserving our loyalty and devotion. When a Jew recites the Shema and a Christian echoes the Lord's prayer, we're responding to the same voice of Love.
Doctrine matters, but love is the deeper grammar. A Jew loving faithfully, sacrificially, obediently, and a Christian doing the same are alike.
For Christians: God entered humanity specifically as a Jew—circumcised, keeping Sabbath, celebrating Passover, quoting Torah. Christians who despise Jews despise the flesh God chose to wear.
Jews await Messiah's coming; Christians await his return. Both live in "already/not yet" tension, longing for the day Isaiah 11:6-9 describes:
the leopard will lie down with the young goat.
The calf and the lion will graze together,
and a little child will lead them.
7 The cow and the bear will graze,
and their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
8 The nursing child will play
over the hole of the cobra,
and the weaned child will put his hand on vipers’ dens.
9 They will neither harm nor destroy
on my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full
of the knowledge of the Lord,
as the waters cover the sea.”
When Jews pursue justice because Torah demands it and Christians pursue justice because Yeshua embodied it, we find ourselves side-by-side. Justice for the widow and orphan, welcoming for the stranger—are no more or less Jewish or Christian.
Love connects us to one another—across theological divides, across histories of pain.
PART THREE: LOVE CONNECTS US TO GOD
We can't bootstrap our way to self-love. That's where God comes in. God doesn't just give us techniques. He does something radical: He loves us first, while we're still unlovable—even to ourselves. "We love because he first loved us." (1 John 4:19)
God doesn't stand outside our struggle. He enters it. Yeshua knows betrayal, denial, abandonment. Yeshua doesn't condemn our failure, He enters it and loves us in it.
Self-love isn't a work we accomplish—it's grace we receive. The difficulty of loving our self drives us to dependence. The believer in God’s Salvation is rescued. Yeshua (יֵשׁוּעַ), a common short form of Yehoshua (Joshua), meaning "Yahweh saves" or "the Lord is salvation."
will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Salvation belongs to the Lord!”
Learning to love yourself is seeing yourself as God sees you.
The journey from knowing God loves you to feeling lovable—that's where God comes in daily through prayer and fellowship.
God doesn't love humanity in general. He knows man is evil.
Genesis 6:5—The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
He loves us personally with our own particular history, specific failures, unique wounds. We can't love ourself with the intimacy God is able to. We are too aware of our darkness. But God can and does.
Love Is the Bridge to God
This is the final connection: love connects us to God. Not through theological precision. Not through our moral performance. The bridge isn't something we build—it's something we walk across. The bridge is love itself.
When we truly love—with love that costs everything and asks nothing in return—we're not just doing something God approves. We are becoming the image that God had for us in the Garden. This is an act of recieving the heart spoken of in Ezekiel 36:26—I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
The Circle Completes: The bridge has three spans: love our self as God loves us, love others as God loves them, and in loving others, we encounter God.
The Invitation — God invites us to walk across the bridge despite our brokenness. Love spans the chasm between who we are and who we are meant to be, between us and your neighbor, between earth and heaven.
Step onto the bridge. Trust that love will hold you. Believe that God has made a way home. As we walk, we'll discover; love is not only the destination. Love is the bridge. And that bridge is a door.
